I don’t have wifi today. And I’m having to type on my phone. So, this post will mostly comprise links. And this might continue for several days. Please bear with me.

Cosas de España

On the way down from Toledo to Valencia yesterday, I bought – at a petrol ststion – a sandwhich comprising chicken, mango curry sauce, rocket lettuce, sliced tomato and crushed almonds. Which probably wouldn’t have been available in Spain 10 years ago. Or even 5 possibly.

Midday today, we picked up my younger daughter and my niece at the airport. En route, I noticed –  in a crowded metro carriage – that there were very few slim folk of any age. Which set me wondering about the regular reports of a growing percentage of overweight folk in Spain. Perhaps they are true. Though my research sample was hardly valid.

Another possibly dubious observation – Valencia is a city of traffic lights and crazy drivers. These 2 facts are possibly related.

It’s reported that almost 60% of Spaniards no longer trust the country’s AVE high-speed rail network. Which I fancy won’t come as a surprise to anyone. In fact, it’s far more of a surprise that the percentage isn’t higher, regardless of its validity. [Perry has provided this commentary from British ‘experts’ on the recent crash and the government’s immediate reaction to it.]

Pv city police are on the heels of a peculiar type of thief – one who specialises in nicking the tops of café/bar WC cisterns. Presumably his mate sells them back to the ex-owners, claiming they fell off the back of a lorry.

The US Iran War

The latest comment from Naked Capitalism . .

Trump America

This says it all really . . . The Reckoning 

The indulgence of hoping for a quiet resolution is a luxury this country can no longer afford. We have endured over a decade of grotesque, vanity-fueled tyranny, a regime that treated human misery not as a regrettable byproduct of governance, but as its primary currency and crowning accomplishment. For years, the American public has been dragged through the gutter of one man’s narcissistic psychosis, forced to bend its knee to the pathetic, unquenchable resentments of a petty tyrant and the sniveling sycophants who rode his coat-tails into power.

Sitting here on November 5, I find myself thinking intensely about what justice actually means right now. I watch the news cycles roll by, anchors talking about gas prices finally dipping under four dollars a gallon, Hakeem Jeffries and political leaders pivoting back to the baseline struggles of everyday life, promising to bring affordability back into the conversation while working families still drown under the cost of groceries and prescriptions. We hear the familiar bullet points about securing Social Security and Medicare, about stitching back together a social contract that was shredded by what can only be called the normalization of cruelty in this country. There is a sense that the global community is cautiously waking up to a new reality, hoping the United States will once again operate with a collective consciousness and present a unified, dependable front to the world.

Rebuilding the mundane logistics of daily life is necessary, but we cannot allow economic relief to become a substitute for historical reckoning. We cannot settle for a quiet return to normalcy while the architects of our ruin walk away untamed. The political machinery may want to move on to budgets and policy debates, but I want to make sure that the people who dragged us to the edge, the ones who engineered the trauma that brought us to this exact day, are held fully, ruthlessly accountable.

I do not merely want Donald Trump out of office; I want him stripped of the theatrical illusions that sustained his reign and forced to swallow the unvarnished, humiliating reality of his crimes.

The fantasy of a heroic martyrdom or a quick, violent end is a coward’s escape, a grotesque gift that would grant him the mythic immortality his inflated ego always craved while leaving his victims buried beneath unanswered questions. He must stay alive. He must live to sit in a room with no gilded molding, no cheering crowds, no fawning television pundits, and no social media megaphones to scream over the truth. I want him trapped in a brightly lit, sterile room where his tantrums carry zero weight, where his frantic attempts to interrupt are cut off by the flat, dismissive tone of a magistrate who regards him not as a king, an icon, or a monster, but as a banal, miserable defendant.

Let him sit there, stripped of his hair dye and his brassy costumes, while the ledger of his cruelty is read aloud. Let Stephen Miller, Pete Hegseth, and every enabling parasite who mistook state-sanctioned malice for strength be dragged into that same cold light. Power stripped of its impunity is the ultimate indignity to a bully, and that indignity must be inflicted systematically, document by document, order by order.

I want every single decision brought to the surface and carved into the permanent record. Who signed off on turning child abuse into official border policy? Who authorized summary strikes on boats in the Caribbean and Pacific, treating international waters as a private hunting ground? Who calculated the collateral damage when explosives tore through a school in Minab, shattering families who will spend the rest of their lives in grief? I want the internal routing slips. I want the names on the memos. I want the legal lackeys who manufactured contorted justifications for war crimes placed under oath and forced to explain their cowardice to a judge.

And above all, I want the victims to speak, uninterrupted, unhurried, and unstoppable.

For decades, powerful predators and political sociopaths operated under the comfortable assumption that wealth, nondisclosure agreements, and political leverage could bury the women they abused and the families they destroyed. I want the survivors of Jeffrey Epstein’s network and Trump’s orbit to stand at a podium with an open microphone, while the men who spent years stepping on them are legally bound to sit, shut up, and listen. No bluster. No attack-dog lawyers poisoning the news cycle. Just the relentless, crushing weight of victim testimony exposing the hollow, sordid truth of who these men actually are.

Rebuilding a shattered democracy is not an exercise in polite reconciliation, economic distraction, or bipartisan amnesia. It requires an uncompromising, merciless pursuit of criminal accountability. Where the evidence meets the threshold for crimes against humanity, prosecutors must bring those indictments without hesitation, whether in federal district courts or international tribunals. There can be no unearned grace, no comfortable retirements, no soft-focus memoirs, and no sacred immunity for high-ranking ghouls.

If we possess any collective self-respect as a nation and as a global community, we will not allow the architects of this ruin to fade gently into golf-course obscurity while we celebrate cheaper gas and stabilized safety nets. We must demand that the full, agonizing truth be dragged into the sun, and that the men who built their power on human suffering are forced to look their victims in the eye and hear every single word.

Michael Jochum — Not Just a Drummer: Reflections on Art, Politics, Dogs, and the Human Condition.

Spanish

– Una noria: A ferris wheel.

– La peonada: The working day.

– Cerrejero: Lock/key smith

Did You Know About . 

A cat, a tube, a vacuum and a journey.

P. S. When I was a very young kid, several shops I visited still used these tubes to send orders, cash and receipts – but not felines – back and forth. I loved the sound of them in operation.

Finally . 

So much cocaine is currently landing on our coast that the rock-bottom price is now a mere 9,000 euros a kilo. But still less than ink for your printer.